Can you really patent an “emoticon”?

The patent, which was published by the US patent office on Thursday, covers selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to these pixels and reconstructing the emoticon after transmission.

The implications of this is more than a little odd. The funny thing is Microsoft keeps saying their for Innovation. I like to code with disctintve comments in PERL:
while(<STDIN>) {
chomp;
# Clean up the string...
$_ =~ s/^s+(.*?)s+/$1/;

# Split up the record
@Temp = split(/t/, $_);

# Clean up Each Field
foreach(@Temp) {
$_ =~ s/^s+(.*?)s+/$1/;
} # End of foreach(@Temp) {
# Do something else...
} # end of while(<STDIN>) {